AT THE ROUNDED HALLOWS – JULY 20, 2007
Red rain in the drowning day
seeks cold pleasure
in driving hearts to a coarse death.
Rain of seasonal turbulences
unreasonable,
wafting across heart-wide oceanic regimes
vast, very silent,
and with cloud-messengers
bearing to many homes
a deathly wreath of longing
and of knowing.
Red-as-can-be rain,
beloved of waters,
of the earth and of the heart,
and a sum of seized songs
of surrendered souls,
red, so-red rain.
A crafted song here for the rain that seeps through most senses –
and sweeps through the valley of the heart –
as that river we adored loved asked for
and lost, forever.
Those who have watched rivers flow across their lives will realise how vivid a picture it is - watching a river, day in, day out, each minute of one's life passing in drops and gulps of air, of rising blood in, a languid love for and ever-present-silently-creeping-about hatred of, an unnatural growth....and all the while waiting for some strange thing that would rise or fall down, swoop down upon oneself, to end that sempiternal flow.
Apprehensive. Fearful. Yet waiting, ceaselessly, endlessly. For nothing in particular. But still waiting.
Thus have I watched my river grow with me.
It may have been here, for all I know; millenia before our people came to settle on this two-bit earth so beautifully wrought with fertile valleys and strangely infertile, apparently cursed spots of land where, as that leering Naidu from the O.N.G.C. office tells me, spurts of liquid wealth lie in wait, biding their time, cleverly straining to gush out. 'It only needs a little prodding', Leering Naidu would add, with a loud guffaw and a meaningful wink.
But do rivers actually survive for that long a period of time – I doubt it in spite of myself. Do they live in peace when there is that awful tread of homelessness upon their banks? I wonder, could my river have resisted all that and survived?
My meek river. My cowed down, mulled-waters-flowing-in-sorrow river. I wonder - what secrets of ancestry and trysts does it hide in its murky waters straining against the brightly birling sun that crosses our tiny earth each day, and wanders below it, sogaa-like each night.
But it was here, a huge body of water, a cause of sorrow for the valley's peoples who lived, farmed and prospered on its banks, at least a few centuries ago, barely a millenium, I know this from my readings of the ancient sagas; those kathas and gathas that have been left to our people by our long-fled forefathers who could not bear the confusion and the doubt engendered by each roving ripple on the chaotic surfaces of the river. And even now, this mysterious river of mangled history continues to grow.
The charanas and the kaviyals who sang of the river's might in the days of yore tell us that it had been a mighty river, as wide and huge as the holy Ganga herself. They tell us the great tale of the river's origin - how the great God Vishnu, in his incarnation as the Cosmic Boar, or Varaha, had once caressed the Earth goddess Medini with his tusks when he had made love to her. One of those cosmic dentures had pierced the poor paramour of the great God and had created an obvious rent in her delicate bosom. Our river was born of that awesome penetration. Varaha-vaktra - they called it; Born from the Visage of the Boar, literally.
Over the many ages that had supposedly passed after that great cosmic event, the riv er had come to be known as Varavaktra, Boroboktro, Borobokro and then had passed into the domain of the recent, the contemporary, the best of the lot and the worst of the ages.
It is known as Barabak now, the vestiges of the Vishnu-Medini-name long since fled into oblivion.
This present name, Barabak, simply means “the river which has many a big twist”.
